It's the Brian Lear Show. I'm producer Amina Serna, filling in for Brian today.

Now for an update on transit news. and this week that means transit lawsuits.

The MTA is suing the federal government and it's being sued by the transit union.

To talk about those suits and more, I'm joined now by Stephen Nesson, transportation reporter for the WNYC Newsroom.

Hi, Stephen.

Good morning, Amina. All right, so let's start with a lawsuit by the TWU. This is over a new policy of not backfilling sick or vacationing station agents assigned to what are still called token booths. So the MTA is leaving some stations without any actual person to go to for a question or problem. Well, so a little bit of background about this.

As you alluded to, those booths in the stations used to be called token booths because that's where folks bought tokens back in the day.

Obviously, the metro card came around and sort of made that job somewhat obsolete.

But people could still refill metro cards there.

And those booths used to carry a lot of money until the pandemic.

And then the MTA, you know, they didn't want those folks interacting with the public.

You remember it was, you know, nobody knew what to do, but that was trying to reduce the number

of interactions with the public.

So that job really became quite obsolete during that time.

They weren't even handling transactions anymore.

Right.

So they sort of

gradually turned into these sort of customer service centers. And in 2022, the MTA was actually

just trying to eliminate it entirely. They made a deal with the union that these folks won't lose

their jobs, but they'll be assigned to sort of walk around the station,

help people who seem lost and provide an extra set of eyes and ears in the station for security and whatnot.

And so now the MTA came out with this policy in January that if one of those folks is sick or on vacation or on maternity leave

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